CSR

“A shared sense of values can create a ‘we’ powerful enough to head off crises, transform organizations and propel strategic business decisions,“ writes columnist Gael O’Brien. She takes a look at three different organizations – a Fortune 500 company, a family-owned regional business and an online company – to see how values could affect challenges each will confront in 2015.

Major U.S. retail chains like Target and K-Mart are being criticized by some consumer groups for opening on Thanksgiving Day. Columnist Gael O’Brien finds she agrees with the critics. In the rush for short-term profits, she says, companies are “losing capital” with their employees and damaging their reputations as responsible corporate citizens.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill holding the state’s employers legally responsible for wage and safety violations committed by their subcontractors and temp agencies. With the new law, California will have some of the country’s farthest-reaching protections for temporary workers, among the fastest growing and most vulnerable segments of the workforce.

For workers stuck on the bottom rung, living on poverty wages is hard enough. But many also are victims of wage theft, a catch-all term for payroll abuses that cheat workers of income they are supposedly guaranteed by law. Over the last few years employers ranging from baseball’s San Francisco Giants to Subway franchises to Farmers Insurance have been cited for wage violations.